Barcoder

Barcoder is a bash script that creates barcodes out of movie files.

What is a Movie Barcode

• You take a frame from the movie every X seconds
• You squash them to Y pixels wide
• You lay them side by side
• Then you squash them to 1 pixel height and back to your required height to get the frames avarage color
• The result is a smooth barcode-like image that shows the average colors of most scenes in a movie
• Kinda like a movie fingerprint

Requirements

• Imagemagick
• ffmpeg

(Only tested on OSX El Capitan and Sierra, but should work on any bash console with imagemagick and ffmpeg, it's pretty straighforward)

Usage

It's simple. Make the script executable, and run it on the movie (in a folder preferrably since we will be creating subfolders) with your desired parameters.

Arguments:

• -f filename : The video to parse (required)
• -i XX : interval for snapshots (default 4 seconds)
• -H XX : height of output in pixels (default 1080)
• -s XX : width of slice in pixels (default 1)
• -p : If set preserves frames and slices which are otherwise deleted
• -o : Set output prefix (default: barcode)
• -h : Prints a semihelpful help message

Example

Snap every 90 seconds with a slice width of 3 pixels

$ cd movie_directory
$ /path/to/barcoder.sh -f moviename.avi -i 90 -s 3

Snap every 2 seconds, and preserve intermediate files

$ cd movie_directory
$ /path/to/barcoder.sh -f videofile.mkv -i 2 -p

Custom output fileprefix

$ cd movie_directory
$ /path/to/barcoder.sh -f videofile.mkv -o mymoviebarcode

(will create mymoviebarcode_raw.png and mymoviebarcode_smooth.png instead of barcode_raw and _smooth)

The script will create 2 folders "narrow" and "frames" where the slices and the full frames will be stored respectively. These are deleted (so make sure you do this in a clean folder to avoid unpleasant surprises) unless you specify the -p option to preserve them.

The barcode will be barcode_raw.png for the unsmoothed version and barcode_smooth.png for the smooth version (which has been squashed and resized again).

Todo

• Give option to define dimensions and derive interval from dimensions and slice width
• Give option to define dimensions, grab movie length and derive interval or slice width

License

I don't think it's needed, but in any case, do whatever you want with it, so MIT

I made this for my very talented cinematographer friend Yiannis Manolopoulos.

We started with the montage of the images, and then I thought, this should be really easy to automate. And as it turns out, it was :)

Free Software, Hell Yeah!